Jordan West Paints a Colorful and Stark View of Familiar Places

Hailing from Santa Fe, New Mexico, Jordan West is a self taught artist whose paintings depict everyday places- rows of food in eerily empty supermarkets, bathroom stalls, gas stations, and airport terminals- often with a sense of unease and loneliness despite their bright and cheerful palette. In his “Attention All Shoppers” series, painted with gouache on paper, West offers a new perception of a commonplace grocery store, flattening it into a stark world of simple greens, oranges, blues, and yellows, and shapes that borderline abstract. Looking at West’s work immediately calls to mind other Pop artists like Ed Ruscha, who combined elements of graphic design, cinema and an interest in architecture in his barren America-scapes, and figurative artist Alex Katz, who employed bold simplicity and heightened colors. At his website, West explains that his images are a reflection of how we each encounter our otherwise ordinary surroundings: “The work is a chronicle of the experience of the individual in public spaces. The environments are initially experienced and captured photographically, then edited and realized by paint. The pattern and color, although deviating from the original image, simplify and reduce description of the space, which endures as a record of human experience; emphasizing notions of fate, the sublime, isolation, dream, memory, vision and history.”